BEFORE: Today, March 6, is "Hollywood on Hollywood" day over at TCM - followed by "Pre-Code" movies after 8 pm. Here's the line-up:
6:00 am "What Price Hollywood" (1932)
7:30 am "A Star is Born" (1937)
9:30 am "The Oscar" (1966)
11:45 am "Inside Daisy Clover" (1965)
2:00 pm "The Star" (1953)
3:45 pm "The Bad and the Beautiful" (1952)
6:00 pm "Singin' in the Rain" (1952)
8:00 pm "The Divorcee" (1930)
9:30 pm "The Sin of Madelon Claudet" (1931)
11:00 pm "She Done Him Wrong" (1933)
12:15 am "Gold Diggers of 1933" (1933)
2:15 am "A Free Soul" (1931)
4:00 am "Anna Christie" (1930)
Ugh, I'm doing terrible today, I've only seen "Inside Daisy Clover" and "Singin' in the Rain" out of this bunch - I've seen three versions of "A Star Is Born" but not the original one. So now I'm at 37 out of 69, or 53.6%. I always start out so strong and then my numbers drop.
Under a week until the new Oscar ceremony to name the Best Picture of 2022 - I've got like zero chance of seeing any more of the nominees - that's how backed up I am on movies, but in the two weeks after the ceremony, I'm hoping to get to "Black Panther 2" and Guillermo del Toro's "Pinocchio".
Michael Vartan carries over from "The Pallbearer".
THE PLOT: Charlotte's love life is reduced to an endless string of disastrous blind dates, until she meets the perfect man, Kevin. Unfortunately, his merciless mother will do anything to destroy their relationship.
AFTER: You can see the reasoning for casting Michael Vartan here - imagine you're a casting director working on a movie with two very big female stars in it, I mean like BIG personalities, big egos, and the film is all about their characters squaring off against each other. You need an actor to play the son/boyfriend who's not going to get in their way or try to outshine them - you need like a total blank, like the equivalent of vanilla. He'll do the job, but you'll barely notice him during the film, and you'll forget him about five minutes after the film was over. Then for the rest of your life, whenever you think about the movie, you might say, "Wait, WHO was the actor in this movie?" and all you'll remember will be J. Lo and J. Fo. I've already forgotten what the guy even looks like and I JUST watched the film a few hours ago.
The female stars both do well here, I guess - but I can't believe this film was released 18 years ago, Jennifer Lopez probably broke up with Ben Affleck shortly before filming this, and after a few more public relationships (Marc Anthony, Alex Rodriguez), now they're back together. They got married in July 2022, 20 years after the first proposal. I guess what comes around goes around, or alternatively if you love someone, set them free, and umm, I forget how that one ends, but in this case they sometimes come back? Look, I got nothing against Bennifer or the sequel, whatever works for those crazy kids. And Jane Fonda's still making movies, too, I'll have to check out "80 for Brady" when it hits streaming, I'm just not sure if it should count as a romance film.
The real criminal here is the director, Robert Luketic, who thought that comedy should be mined from the contentious relationship between a bride and her future mother-in-law. Really, making fun of mothers-in-law is even too old to be considered "classic", it's cheap laughs AT BEST, and this is not comedy at its best. It's like making a comedy out of grandmothers who cook or molesting uncles, it's just grabbing what's at hand, like comedy leftovers for dinner. I know this same director made "Legally Blonde", and that's fine, but this is bottom-of-the-barrel stuff, by rights the system should have prevented him from making another film after this one, but the system failed, because he later directed "The Ugly Truth", an alleged comedy filled with sexism and remember that vibrating panties gag? Yeecchh. And then he made "Killers", a comedy about a secret assassin, which just plain forgot to be funny. Somebody stop this guy before he films again!
We should live in enlightened times, there should be no reason for a mother-in-law to hate hate HATE her son's intended bride, whether it's because she's Latina or because she's not rich, or because she doesn't have a steady job, NONE of that is OK. Whatever happened to just being happy about whoever your son wants to marry? Why can't she just be happy because her son is happy? Oh, sure, you can say she's upset because she recently lost her broadcasting job, but then you're just making excuses for her. Nothing else going on in her life, NOTHING justifies her being a total bitch to her son's girlfriend. But the film keeps making up more and more excuses for her - she's old, she's an alcoholic, she's spoiled. No, no, NO, none of those are valid and none of them excuse her terrible behavior.
It feels like they made one movie, where Fonda's character, Viola, was even worse - like she genuinely tried to poison Charlie with peanuts, and then they tested that with an audience and people said, "Oh, no, we hate this character because she tried to murder her daughter-in-law" so they had to go back and re-shoot the scene so she only ACCIDENTALLY puts nuts in her food. Or to be more clear, she does it, then she gets talked out of doing it, then she regrets it, then the food accidentally gets delivered to the table. So she did it, but she didn't MEAN to do it, or she regretted it, but that doesn't negate it. If Ted Bundy regretted all his murders would we have let him off the hook? No way. This is a film chock full of bad ideas for bad behavior, and then it was made worse by somebody trying to soften the blows once they realized how bad the actions were.
Some of the other bad behavior on display here - Viola fakes an anxiety attack, Viola hires a waiter to pose as her doctor/therapist, Viola pretends to take medication which is really only vitamins, and Viola has the nerve to wear white at someone else's wedding. NONE of this is OK, and worse, it's never really explained, either, it's just taken for granted that mothers-in-law are going to be terrible to their daughters-in-law, and nope, that's not OK either. Viola sets out to drive Charlie crazy while her son is away at a medical conference, but all of her bad-roommate behavior is so ridiculous it's barely even worth mentioning - just a bunch of time filler stuff, really. But if someone else wears white to your wedding, I think you have the right to throw them out.
And both Will Arnett and Adam Scott are TOTALLY wasted here, like the director didn't know what to do with them but put them in the "not-gay groom's best friend" and "gay bride's best friend" roles. That's enough, right? NOPE.
Finally, something redeeming at the end, when Viola's own mother-in-law crashes the wedding, and Viola gets a taste of her own medicine. Yes, bullying is a cycle, and the people who get bullied are more likely to bully others, this much rings true. But the cycle CAN be broken, it just takes a little effort, some therapy from someone who isn't really a waiter, and maybe some drugs that aren't just vitamin C tablets.
Also starring Jennifer Lopez (last seen in "Shall We Dance?"), Jane Fonda (last seen in "The Kid Stays in the Picture"), Wanda Sykes (last seen in "Friendsgiving"), Adam Scott (last seen in "A.C.O.D."), Monet Mazur (last seen in "Just Married"), Annie Parisse (last seen in "One for the Money"), Will Arnett (last seen in "Muppets Haunted Mansion"), Elaine Stritch (last seen in "Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me"), Stephen Dunham (last seen in "Savages"), Wayne Nickel, Jenny Wade (last seen in "Rumor Has It..."), Stephanie Turner, Tomiko Fraser (last seen in "Head Over Heels"), Bruce Gray (last seen in "Crimson Peak"), Zach McLarty (last seen in "Anything Else"), with cameos from Mark Moses (last seen in "After the Sunset"), Harriet Sansom Harris (last seen in "Licorice Pizza"), Jimmy-Jean-Louis (last seen in "The Gray Man").
RATING: 3 out of 10 literal slaps in the face.
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